J
Joe S.
Guest
QUOTE
How Lost the War Is
By Peter Galbraith, The New York Review of Books and TomDispatch
Posted on July 19, 2007, Printed on July 19, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/57286/
[This essay appears in the August 16th, 2007 issue of the New York Review of
Books and is posted here with the kind permission of the editors of that
magazine.]
1.
On May 30, the Coalition held a ceremony in the Kurdistan town of Erbil to
mark its handover of security in Iraq's three Kurdish provinces from the
Coalition to the Iraqi government. General Benjamin Mixon, the U.S.
commander for northern Iraq, praised the Iraqi government for overseeing all
aspects of the handover. And he drew attention to the "benchmark" now
achieved: with the handover, he said, Iraqis now controlled security in
seven of Iraq's eighteen provinces.
In fact, nothing was handed over. The only Coalition force in Kurdistan is
the peshmerga, a disciplined army that fought alongside the Americans in the
2003 campaign to oust Saddam Hussein and is loyal to the Kurdistan
government in Erbil. The peshmerga provided security in the three Kurdish
provinces before the handover and after. The Iraqi army has not been on
Kurdistan's territory since 1996 and is effectively prohibited from being
there. Nor did the Iraqi flag fly at the ceremony. It is banned in
Kurdistan.
Although the Erbil handover was a sham that Prince Potemkin might have
admired, it was not easily arranged. The Bush administration had wanted the
handover to take place before the U.S. congressional elections in November.
But it also wanted an Iraqi flag flown at the ceremony and some
acknowledgement that Iraq, not Kurdistan, was in charge. The Kurds were
prepared to include a reference to Iraq in the ceremony, but they were
adamant that there be no Iraqi flags. It took months to work out a
compromise ceremony with no flags at all. Thus the ceremony was followed by
a military parade without a single flag -- an event so unusual that one
observer thought it might merit mention in Ripley's Believe it or Not.
Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser, attended the
ceremony alongside Kurdistan's prime minister, Nechirvan Barzani, but the
Iraqi government had no part in supervising the nonexistent handover. While
General Mixon, a highly regarded strategist with excellent ties to the
Kurds, had no choice but to make the remarks he did, Mowaffak al-Rubaie
acknowledged Kurdistan's distinct nature and the right of the Kurds --
approximately six million people, or some 20% of Iraq's population -- to
chart their own course.
On July 12, the White House released a congressionally mandated report on
progress in Iraq. As with the sham handover, the report reflected the
administration's desperate search for indicators of progress since it began
its "surge" by sending five additional combat brigades to the country in
February 2007. In recent months the Bush administration and its advocates
have been promoting the success of the surge in reducing sectarian killing
in Baghdad and achieving a turnaround in Anbar province, where former Sunni
insurgents are signing up with local militias to fight al-Qaeda.
Although reliable statistics about Iraq are notoriously hard to come by it
does appear that the overall civilian death toll in Baghdad has declined
from its pre-surge peak, although it is still at the extremely high levels
of the summer of 2006. Moreover, the number of unidentified bodies --
usually the victims of Shiite death squads -- has risen in May and June to
pre-surge levels. How much of the modest decline in civilian deaths in
Baghdad is attributable to the surge is not knowable, nor is there any way
to know if it will last.
The developments in Anbar are more significant. Tribesmen who had been
attacking U.S. troops in support of the insurgency are now taking U.S.
weapons to fight al-Qaeda and other Sunni extremists. Unfortunately, the
Sunni fundamentalists are not the only enemy of these new U.S.-sponsored
militias. The Sunni tribes also regard Iraq's Shiite-led government as an
enemy, and the U.S. appears now to be in the business of arming both the
Sunni and Shiite factions in what has long since become a civil war.
Against the backdrop of modest progress, much has not changed, or has gotten
worse. The Baghdad Green Zone is subject to increasingly accurate mortar
attacks and is deemed at greater risk of penetration by suicide bombers.
Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric whose Mahdi Army was a major
target of Bush's surge strategy, remains one of Iraq's most powerful
political figures. The military activity against his forces seems only to
have enhanced his standing with the public.
Even if the surge has had some modest military success, it has failed to
accomplish its political objectives. The idea behind Bush's new strategy was
to increase temporarily the number of U.S. troops in Baghdad and Anbar. The
aim was to provide a breathing space so that Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki's government might enact a program of national reconciliation that
would accommodate enough Sunnis to isolate the insurgents. Meanwhile, Iraqi
forces, improved by their close relations with U.S. troops and additional
training, would take over security.
The core of the national reconciliation program is a series of legislative
and political steps that the government should take to address the concerns
of Iraq's Sunnis, who feel left out of the country they dominated until
2003. These steps include an oil revenue-sharing law (to ensure that the
oil-poor Sunni regions get their share of revenue); holding provincial
elections (the Sunnis boycotted the January 2005 provincial and
parliamentary elections leaving them underrepresented even in Sunni-majority
provinces); revising Iraq's constitution (the Sunnis want a more centralized
state); revising the ban on public sector employment of former Baathists
(Sunnis dominated the upper ranks of the Baath Party and of the Saddam-era
public service), and a fair distribution of reconstruction funds. Both the
administration and Congress have placed great emphasis on the obligation of
the Iraqi government to achieve these so-called benchmarks. Congress has, by
law, linked US strategy on Iraq and financial support of the Iraqi
government to progress on these benchmarks and other steps.
Iraq's government has not met one of the benchmarks, and, with the exception
of the revenue-sharing law, most are unlikely to happen. But even if they
were all enacted, it would not help. Provincial elections will make Iraq
less governable while the process of constitutional revision could break the
country apart.
Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, likes to talk of the disparity
between the Iraqi clock and the U.S. clock, suggesting that Iraqis believe
they have more time to reach agreement than the American political calendar
will tolerate. Crocker is the State Department's foremost Iraq hand but,
more generally, American impatience often reflects ignorance. For example,
both Congress and the administration have expressed frustration that the ban
on public service by ex-Baathists has not been relaxed, since this appears
to be a straightforward change, easily accomplished and already promised by
Iraq's leaders.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC,
previously known as SCIRI), which is Iraq's leading Shiite party and a
critical component of Prime Minister al-Maliki's coalition. He is the sole
survivor of eight brothers. During Saddam's rule Baathists executed six of
them. On August 29, 2003, a suicide bomber, possibly linked to the
Baathists, blew up his last surviving brother, and predecessor as SCIRI
leader, at the shrine of Ali in Najaf. Moqtada al-Sadr, Hakim's main rival,
comes from Iraq's other prominent Shiite religious family. Saddam's Baath
regime murdered his father and two brothers in 1999. Earlier, in April 1980,
the regime had arrested Moqtada's father-in-law and the father-in-law's
sister -- the Grand Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr and Bint al-Huda. While the
ayatollah watched, the Baath security men raped and killed his sister. They
then set fire to the ayatollah's beard before driving nails into his head.
De-Baathification is an intensely personal issue for Iraq's two most
powerful Shiite political leaders, as it is to hundreds of thousands of
their followers who suffered similar atrocities.
Iraq's Shiite leaders are reluctant to spend reconstruction money in Sunni
areas because they believe, not without reason, that such funds support the
Sunni side in the civil war. In a speech in late June on the Senate floor
Indiana Republican Richard Lugar reported that Iraq's Shiite-led government
has gone "out of its way to bottle up money budgeted for Sunni provinces"
and that the "strident intervention" of the U.S. embassy was required in
order to get food rations delivered to Sunni towns.
Iraq's mainstream Shiite leaders resist holding new provincial elections
because they know what such elections are likely to bring. Because the
Sunnis boycotted the January 2005 elections, they do not control the
northern governorate, or province, of Nineveh, in which there is a Sunni
majority, and they are not represented in governorates with mixed
populations, such as Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. New elections
would, it is argued, give Sunnis a greater voice in the places where they
live, and the Shiites say they do not have a problem with this, although
just how they would treat the militant Sunnis who would be elected is far
from clear. The Kurds reluctantly accept new elections in the Sunni
governorates even though it means they will lose control of Nineveh and have
a much-reduced presence in Diyala.
The American benchmark of holding provincial elections would also require
new elections in southern Iraq and Baghdad. If they were held, al-Hakim's
Shiite party, the SIIC, which now controls seven of the nine southern
governorates, would certainly lose ground to Moqtada al-Sadr. His main base
is in Baghdad and new elections would almost certainly leave his followers
in control of Baghdad Governorate, with one quarter of Iraq's population.
Iraq's decentralized constitution gives the governorates enormous powers and
significant shares of the national budget, if they choose to exercise these
powers. New local elections are not required until 2009 and it is hard to
see how early elections strengthening al-Sadr, who is hostile to the U.S.
and appears to have close ties to Iran, serve American interests. But this
is precisely what the Bush administration is pushing for and Congress seems
to want.
Constitutional revision is the most significant benchmark and it could break
Iraq apart. Iraq's constitution, approved by 79% of voters in an October
2005 referendum, is the product of a Kurdish-Shiite deal: the Kurds
supported the establishment of a Shiite-led government in exchange for
Shiite support for a confederal arrangement in which Kurdistan and other
regions like the one SIIC hopes to set up in the south, are virtually
independent.
Since there is no common ground among the Shiites, Kurds, and Sunnis on any
significant constitutional changes in favor of the Sunnis, such changes must
come at the expense of the Kurds or Shiites. Since voters in these
communities have a veto on any constitutional amendments, they are certain
to fail in a referendum. A revised constitution has no chance of being
enacted but its failure will exacerbate tensions among Iraq's three groups.
Constitutionally, Iraq's central government has almost no power, and the
Bush administration is partially to blame for this. When the constitution
was being drafted in 2005, the United Nations came up with a series of
proposals that would have made for more workable sharing of power between
regions and the central government. The U.S. embassy stopped the UN from
presenting these proposals because it hoped for a final document as
centralized as (and textually close to) the interim constitution written by
the Americans.
When the constitution finally emerged in its present form, then U.S.
Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad brokered a deal with several Sunni leaders
whereby, in exchange for Sunni support for ratification, there would be a
fast-track process to revise the constitution in the months following
ratification to meet Sunni concerns. Like the Bush administration, the
Sunnis want a more centralized state. While the U.S. insists that
constitutional revision is a moral obligation, the Sunnis actually never
lived up to their end of the bargain. Almost unanimously, they voted against
ratification of the current constitution.
With input from the United Nations (belatedly brought back into the process
last year), the Iraqi Parliament's mainly Arab Constitutional Review
Committee (CRC) is considering amendments that would strip Kurdistan of many
of its powers, including its right to cancel federal laws, to decide on
taxes applicable in its own territory, and to control its own oil and water.
The Sunni Arabs would also like Iraq declared an Arab state, a measure the
non-Arab Kurds consider racist and exclusionary.
Thanks to Khalilzad's expedited procedures, constitutional revision may be
the final wedge between Kurdistan and Arab Iraq. If approved by the CRC, the
constitutional amendments will be subject to a vote in the parliament as a
single package and then to a nationwide referendum. Kurdistan's voters are
certain to reject the proposed package (or any package affecting Kurdistan's
powers), and this could push tense Sunni-Kurdish relations into open
conflict. Kurdish NGOs, who ran a 2005 independence referendum, are poised
to make a "NO" campaign on constitutional revision a "No to Iraq" vote. In
its July 12 report to Congress, the White House graded the CRC's work as
"satisfactory," an evaluation that was either grossly dishonest, or, more
likely, out of touch with Iraqi reality.
For the most part, Iraq's leaders are not personally stubborn or
uncooperative. They find it impossible to reach agreement on the benchmarks
because their constituents don't agree on any common vision for Iraq. The
Shiites voted twice in 2005 for parties that seek to define Iraq as a Shiite
state. By their boycotts and votes the Sunni Arabs have almost unanimously
rejected the Shiite vision of Iraq's future, including the new constitution.
The Kurds' envisage an Iraq that does not include them. In the 2005
parliamentary elections, 99% of them voted for Kurdish nationalist parties,
and in the January 2005 referendum, 98% voted for an independent Kurdistan.
But even if Iraq's politicians could agree to the benchmarks, this wouldn't
end the insurgency or the civil war. Sunni insurgents object to Iraq being
run by Shiite religious parties, which they see as installed by the
Americans, loyal to Iran, and wanting to define Iraq in a way that excludes
the Sunnis. Sunni fundamentalists consider the Shiites apostates who deserve
death, not power. The Shiites believe that their democratic majority and
their historical suffering under the Baathist dictatorship entitle them to
rule. They are not inclined to compromise with Sunnis, whom they see as
their longstanding oppressors, especially when they believe most Iraqi
Sunnis are sympathetic to the suicide bombers that have killed thousands of
ordinary Shiites. The differences are fundamental and cannot be papered over
by sharing oil revenues, reemploying ex-Baathists, or revising the
constitution. The war is not about those things.
2.
The Iraq war is lost. Of course, neither the President nor the war's
intellectual architects are prepared to admit this. Nonetheless, the specter
of defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways.
The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning -- a
stable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the
evil Iranian and Syrian regimes -- but by the consequences of defeat. As
President Bush put it, "The consequences of failure in Iraq would be death
and destruction in the Middle East and here in America."
Tellingly, the Iraq war's intellectual boosters, while insisting the surge
is working, are moving to assign blame for defeat. And they have already
picked their target: the American people. In The Weekly Standard, Tom
Donnelly, a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute,
wrote, "Those who believe the war is already lost -- call it the
Clinton-Lugar axis -- are mounting a surge of their own. Ground won in Iraq
becomes ground lost at home." Lugar provoked Donnelly's anger by noting that
the American people had lost confidence in Bush's Iraq strategy as
demonstrated by the Democratic takeover of both houses of Congress. (This
"blame the American people" approach has, through repetition, almost become
the accepted explanation for the outcome in Vietnam, attributing defeat to a
loss of public support and not to fifteen years of military failure.)
Indeed, Vietnam is the image many Americans have of defeat in Iraq. Al-Qaeda
would overrun the Green Zone and the last Americans would evacuate from the
rooftop of the still unfinished largest embassy in the world. President Bush
feeds on this imagery. In his May 5, 2007, radio address to the nation, he
explained:
If radicals and terrorists emerge from this battle with control of Iraq,
they would have control of a nation with massive oil reserves, which they
could use to fund their dangerous ambitions and spread their influence. The
al Qaeda terrorists who behead captives or order suicide bombings would not
be satisfied to see America defeated and gone from Iraq. They would be
emboldened by their victory, protected by their new sanctuary, eager to
impose their hateful vision on surrounding countries, and eager to harm
Americans.
But there will be no Saigon moment in Iraq. Iraq's Shiite-led government is
in no danger of losing the civil war to al-Qaeda, or a more inclusive Sunni
front. Iraq's Shiites are three times as numerous as Iraq's Sunni Arabs;
they dominate Iraq's military and police and have a powerful ally in
neighboring Iran. The Arab states that might support the Sunnis are small,
far away (vast deserts separate the inhabited parts of Jordan and Saudi
Arabia from the main Iraqi population centers), and can only provide money,
something the insurgency has in great amounts already.
Iraq after an American defeat will look very much like Iraq today -- a land
divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war
being fought within its Arab part. Defeat is defined by America's failure to
accomplish its objective of a self-sustaining, democratic, and unified Iraq.
And that failure has already taken place, along with the increase of Iranian
power in the region.
Iraq's Kurdish leaders and Iraq's dwindling band of secular Arab democrats
fear that a complete U.S. withdrawal will leave all of Iraq under Iranian
influence. Senator Hillary Clinton, Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe
Biden, and former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke are among the prominent
Democrats who have called for the U.S. to protect Kurdistan militarily
should there be a withdrawal from Iraq. The argument for so doing is
straightforward: it secures the one part of Iraq that has emerged as stable,
democratic, and pro-Western; it discharges a moral debt to our Kurdish
allies; it deters both Turkish intervention and a potentially destabilizing
Turkish-Kurdish war; it provides U.S. forces a secure base that can be used
to strike at al-Qaeda in adjacent Sunni territories; and it limits Iran's
gains.
In laying out his dark vision of an American failure, President Bush never
discusses Iran's domination of Iraq even though this is a far more likely
consequence of American defeat than an al-Qaeda victory. Bush's reticence is
understandable since it was his miscalculations and incompetent management
of the postwar occupation that gave Iran its opportunity. While opposing
talks with Iran, the neoconservatives also prefer not to discuss its current
powerful influence over Iraq's central government and southern region,
persisting in the fantasy -- notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary --
that Iran is deeply unpopular among Iraq's Shiites and clerics. (At the same
time, U.S. officials accuse Iran of supplying Iraqi Shiite militias with
particularly lethal roadside bombs.)
3.
On June 25, without giving the press or White House any advance notice,
Richard Lugar, the most respected Republican voice on foreign affairs in
Congress, spoke in the Senate about "connecting our Iraq strategy to our
vital interests." On the face of it, the idea is as sensible and
conservative as the senator delivering the speech. He observed that
political fragmentation in Iraq, the stress suffered by the U.S. military,
and growing antiwar sentiment at home "make it almost impossible for the
United States to engineer a stable, multi-sectarian government in Iraq in a
reasonable time frame." Lugar noted that agreements reached with Iraqi
leaders are most often not implemented, partly, as Lugar observed, because
the leaders do not control their followers but also because Iraqi leaders
have also discovered that telling the Bush administration what it wants to
hear is a fully acceptable substitute for action.
Lugar is blunt in his description of the situation in Iraq:
Few Iraqis have demonstrated that they want to be Iraqis.... In this
context, the possibility that the United States can set meaningful
benchmarks that would provide an indication of impending success or failure
is remote. Perhaps some benchmarks or agreements will be initially achieved,
but most can be undermined or reversed by a contrary edict of the Iraqi
government, a decision by a faction to ignore agreements, or the next
terrorist attack or wave of sectarian killings. American manpower cannot
keep the lid on indefinitely. The anticipation that our training operations
could produce an effective Iraqi army loyal to a cohesive central government
is still just a hopeful plan for the future.
Lugar concluded his speech by urging that we "refocus our policy in Iraq on
realistic assessments of what can be achieved, and on a sober review of our
vital interests in the Middle East." After four years of a war driven more
by wishful thinking than strategy, this is hardly a radical idea, but it has
produced a barrage of covert criticism of Lugar from the administration and
overt attack from the neoconservatives.
Lugar's focus on the achievable runs against main currents of opinion in a
nation increasingly polarized between the growing number who want to
withdraw from Iraq and the die-hard defenders of a failure. We need to
recognize, as Lugar implicitly does, that Iraq no longer exists as a unified
country. In the parts where we can accomplish nothing, we should withdraw.
But there are still three missions that may be achievable -- disrupting
al-Qaeda, preserving Kurdistan's democracy, and limiting Iran's increasing
domination. These can all be served by a modest U.S. presence in Kurdistan.
We need an Iraq policy with sufficient nuance to protect American interests.
Unfortunately, we probably won't get it.
Peter W. Galbraith, a former US Ambassador to Croatia, is Senior Diplomatic
Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and a principal at the Windham
Resources Group, a firm that negotiates on behalf of its clients in
post-conflict societies, including Iraq. His The End of Iraq: How American
Incompetence Created a War Without End is now out in paperback
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/57286/
END QUOTE
How Lost the War Is
By Peter Galbraith, The New York Review of Books and TomDispatch
Posted on July 19, 2007, Printed on July 19, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/57286/
[This essay appears in the August 16th, 2007 issue of the New York Review of
Books and is posted here with the kind permission of the editors of that
magazine.]
1.
On May 30, the Coalition held a ceremony in the Kurdistan town of Erbil to
mark its handover of security in Iraq's three Kurdish provinces from the
Coalition to the Iraqi government. General Benjamin Mixon, the U.S.
commander for northern Iraq, praised the Iraqi government for overseeing all
aspects of the handover. And he drew attention to the "benchmark" now
achieved: with the handover, he said, Iraqis now controlled security in
seven of Iraq's eighteen provinces.
In fact, nothing was handed over. The only Coalition force in Kurdistan is
the peshmerga, a disciplined army that fought alongside the Americans in the
2003 campaign to oust Saddam Hussein and is loyal to the Kurdistan
government in Erbil. The peshmerga provided security in the three Kurdish
provinces before the handover and after. The Iraqi army has not been on
Kurdistan's territory since 1996 and is effectively prohibited from being
there. Nor did the Iraqi flag fly at the ceremony. It is banned in
Kurdistan.
Although the Erbil handover was a sham that Prince Potemkin might have
admired, it was not easily arranged. The Bush administration had wanted the
handover to take place before the U.S. congressional elections in November.
But it also wanted an Iraqi flag flown at the ceremony and some
acknowledgement that Iraq, not Kurdistan, was in charge. The Kurds were
prepared to include a reference to Iraq in the ceremony, but they were
adamant that there be no Iraqi flags. It took months to work out a
compromise ceremony with no flags at all. Thus the ceremony was followed by
a military parade without a single flag -- an event so unusual that one
observer thought it might merit mention in Ripley's Believe it or Not.
Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser, attended the
ceremony alongside Kurdistan's prime minister, Nechirvan Barzani, but the
Iraqi government had no part in supervising the nonexistent handover. While
General Mixon, a highly regarded strategist with excellent ties to the
Kurds, had no choice but to make the remarks he did, Mowaffak al-Rubaie
acknowledged Kurdistan's distinct nature and the right of the Kurds --
approximately six million people, or some 20% of Iraq's population -- to
chart their own course.
On July 12, the White House released a congressionally mandated report on
progress in Iraq. As with the sham handover, the report reflected the
administration's desperate search for indicators of progress since it began
its "surge" by sending five additional combat brigades to the country in
February 2007. In recent months the Bush administration and its advocates
have been promoting the success of the surge in reducing sectarian killing
in Baghdad and achieving a turnaround in Anbar province, where former Sunni
insurgents are signing up with local militias to fight al-Qaeda.
Although reliable statistics about Iraq are notoriously hard to come by it
does appear that the overall civilian death toll in Baghdad has declined
from its pre-surge peak, although it is still at the extremely high levels
of the summer of 2006. Moreover, the number of unidentified bodies --
usually the victims of Shiite death squads -- has risen in May and June to
pre-surge levels. How much of the modest decline in civilian deaths in
Baghdad is attributable to the surge is not knowable, nor is there any way
to know if it will last.
The developments in Anbar are more significant. Tribesmen who had been
attacking U.S. troops in support of the insurgency are now taking U.S.
weapons to fight al-Qaeda and other Sunni extremists. Unfortunately, the
Sunni fundamentalists are not the only enemy of these new U.S.-sponsored
militias. The Sunni tribes also regard Iraq's Shiite-led government as an
enemy, and the U.S. appears now to be in the business of arming both the
Sunni and Shiite factions in what has long since become a civil war.
Against the backdrop of modest progress, much has not changed, or has gotten
worse. The Baghdad Green Zone is subject to increasingly accurate mortar
attacks and is deemed at greater risk of penetration by suicide bombers.
Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric whose Mahdi Army was a major
target of Bush's surge strategy, remains one of Iraq's most powerful
political figures. The military activity against his forces seems only to
have enhanced his standing with the public.
Even if the surge has had some modest military success, it has failed to
accomplish its political objectives. The idea behind Bush's new strategy was
to increase temporarily the number of U.S. troops in Baghdad and Anbar. The
aim was to provide a breathing space so that Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki's government might enact a program of national reconciliation that
would accommodate enough Sunnis to isolate the insurgents. Meanwhile, Iraqi
forces, improved by their close relations with U.S. troops and additional
training, would take over security.
The core of the national reconciliation program is a series of legislative
and political steps that the government should take to address the concerns
of Iraq's Sunnis, who feel left out of the country they dominated until
2003. These steps include an oil revenue-sharing law (to ensure that the
oil-poor Sunni regions get their share of revenue); holding provincial
elections (the Sunnis boycotted the January 2005 provincial and
parliamentary elections leaving them underrepresented even in Sunni-majority
provinces); revising Iraq's constitution (the Sunnis want a more centralized
state); revising the ban on public sector employment of former Baathists
(Sunnis dominated the upper ranks of the Baath Party and of the Saddam-era
public service), and a fair distribution of reconstruction funds. Both the
administration and Congress have placed great emphasis on the obligation of
the Iraqi government to achieve these so-called benchmarks. Congress has, by
law, linked US strategy on Iraq and financial support of the Iraqi
government to progress on these benchmarks and other steps.
Iraq's government has not met one of the benchmarks, and, with the exception
of the revenue-sharing law, most are unlikely to happen. But even if they
were all enacted, it would not help. Provincial elections will make Iraq
less governable while the process of constitutional revision could break the
country apart.
Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, likes to talk of the disparity
between the Iraqi clock and the U.S. clock, suggesting that Iraqis believe
they have more time to reach agreement than the American political calendar
will tolerate. Crocker is the State Department's foremost Iraq hand but,
more generally, American impatience often reflects ignorance. For example,
both Congress and the administration have expressed frustration that the ban
on public service by ex-Baathists has not been relaxed, since this appears
to be a straightforward change, easily accomplished and already promised by
Iraq's leaders.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC,
previously known as SCIRI), which is Iraq's leading Shiite party and a
critical component of Prime Minister al-Maliki's coalition. He is the sole
survivor of eight brothers. During Saddam's rule Baathists executed six of
them. On August 29, 2003, a suicide bomber, possibly linked to the
Baathists, blew up his last surviving brother, and predecessor as SCIRI
leader, at the shrine of Ali in Najaf. Moqtada al-Sadr, Hakim's main rival,
comes from Iraq's other prominent Shiite religious family. Saddam's Baath
regime murdered his father and two brothers in 1999. Earlier, in April 1980,
the regime had arrested Moqtada's father-in-law and the father-in-law's
sister -- the Grand Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr and Bint al-Huda. While the
ayatollah watched, the Baath security men raped and killed his sister. They
then set fire to the ayatollah's beard before driving nails into his head.
De-Baathification is an intensely personal issue for Iraq's two most
powerful Shiite political leaders, as it is to hundreds of thousands of
their followers who suffered similar atrocities.
Iraq's Shiite leaders are reluctant to spend reconstruction money in Sunni
areas because they believe, not without reason, that such funds support the
Sunni side in the civil war. In a speech in late June on the Senate floor
Indiana Republican Richard Lugar reported that Iraq's Shiite-led government
has gone "out of its way to bottle up money budgeted for Sunni provinces"
and that the "strident intervention" of the U.S. embassy was required in
order to get food rations delivered to Sunni towns.
Iraq's mainstream Shiite leaders resist holding new provincial elections
because they know what such elections are likely to bring. Because the
Sunnis boycotted the January 2005 elections, they do not control the
northern governorate, or province, of Nineveh, in which there is a Sunni
majority, and they are not represented in governorates with mixed
populations, such as Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. New elections
would, it is argued, give Sunnis a greater voice in the places where they
live, and the Shiites say they do not have a problem with this, although
just how they would treat the militant Sunnis who would be elected is far
from clear. The Kurds reluctantly accept new elections in the Sunni
governorates even though it means they will lose control of Nineveh and have
a much-reduced presence in Diyala.
The American benchmark of holding provincial elections would also require
new elections in southern Iraq and Baghdad. If they were held, al-Hakim's
Shiite party, the SIIC, which now controls seven of the nine southern
governorates, would certainly lose ground to Moqtada al-Sadr. His main base
is in Baghdad and new elections would almost certainly leave his followers
in control of Baghdad Governorate, with one quarter of Iraq's population.
Iraq's decentralized constitution gives the governorates enormous powers and
significant shares of the national budget, if they choose to exercise these
powers. New local elections are not required until 2009 and it is hard to
see how early elections strengthening al-Sadr, who is hostile to the U.S.
and appears to have close ties to Iran, serve American interests. But this
is precisely what the Bush administration is pushing for and Congress seems
to want.
Constitutional revision is the most significant benchmark and it could break
Iraq apart. Iraq's constitution, approved by 79% of voters in an October
2005 referendum, is the product of a Kurdish-Shiite deal: the Kurds
supported the establishment of a Shiite-led government in exchange for
Shiite support for a confederal arrangement in which Kurdistan and other
regions like the one SIIC hopes to set up in the south, are virtually
independent.
Since there is no common ground among the Shiites, Kurds, and Sunnis on any
significant constitutional changes in favor of the Sunnis, such changes must
come at the expense of the Kurds or Shiites. Since voters in these
communities have a veto on any constitutional amendments, they are certain
to fail in a referendum. A revised constitution has no chance of being
enacted but its failure will exacerbate tensions among Iraq's three groups.
Constitutionally, Iraq's central government has almost no power, and the
Bush administration is partially to blame for this. When the constitution
was being drafted in 2005, the United Nations came up with a series of
proposals that would have made for more workable sharing of power between
regions and the central government. The U.S. embassy stopped the UN from
presenting these proposals because it hoped for a final document as
centralized as (and textually close to) the interim constitution written by
the Americans.
When the constitution finally emerged in its present form, then U.S.
Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad brokered a deal with several Sunni leaders
whereby, in exchange for Sunni support for ratification, there would be a
fast-track process to revise the constitution in the months following
ratification to meet Sunni concerns. Like the Bush administration, the
Sunnis want a more centralized state. While the U.S. insists that
constitutional revision is a moral obligation, the Sunnis actually never
lived up to their end of the bargain. Almost unanimously, they voted against
ratification of the current constitution.
With input from the United Nations (belatedly brought back into the process
last year), the Iraqi Parliament's mainly Arab Constitutional Review
Committee (CRC) is considering amendments that would strip Kurdistan of many
of its powers, including its right to cancel federal laws, to decide on
taxes applicable in its own territory, and to control its own oil and water.
The Sunni Arabs would also like Iraq declared an Arab state, a measure the
non-Arab Kurds consider racist and exclusionary.
Thanks to Khalilzad's expedited procedures, constitutional revision may be
the final wedge between Kurdistan and Arab Iraq. If approved by the CRC, the
constitutional amendments will be subject to a vote in the parliament as a
single package and then to a nationwide referendum. Kurdistan's voters are
certain to reject the proposed package (or any package affecting Kurdistan's
powers), and this could push tense Sunni-Kurdish relations into open
conflict. Kurdish NGOs, who ran a 2005 independence referendum, are poised
to make a "NO" campaign on constitutional revision a "No to Iraq" vote. In
its July 12 report to Congress, the White House graded the CRC's work as
"satisfactory," an evaluation that was either grossly dishonest, or, more
likely, out of touch with Iraqi reality.
For the most part, Iraq's leaders are not personally stubborn or
uncooperative. They find it impossible to reach agreement on the benchmarks
because their constituents don't agree on any common vision for Iraq. The
Shiites voted twice in 2005 for parties that seek to define Iraq as a Shiite
state. By their boycotts and votes the Sunni Arabs have almost unanimously
rejected the Shiite vision of Iraq's future, including the new constitution.
The Kurds' envisage an Iraq that does not include them. In the 2005
parliamentary elections, 99% of them voted for Kurdish nationalist parties,
and in the January 2005 referendum, 98% voted for an independent Kurdistan.
But even if Iraq's politicians could agree to the benchmarks, this wouldn't
end the insurgency or the civil war. Sunni insurgents object to Iraq being
run by Shiite religious parties, which they see as installed by the
Americans, loyal to Iran, and wanting to define Iraq in a way that excludes
the Sunnis. Sunni fundamentalists consider the Shiites apostates who deserve
death, not power. The Shiites believe that their democratic majority and
their historical suffering under the Baathist dictatorship entitle them to
rule. They are not inclined to compromise with Sunnis, whom they see as
their longstanding oppressors, especially when they believe most Iraqi
Sunnis are sympathetic to the suicide bombers that have killed thousands of
ordinary Shiites. The differences are fundamental and cannot be papered over
by sharing oil revenues, reemploying ex-Baathists, or revising the
constitution. The war is not about those things.
2.
The Iraq war is lost. Of course, neither the President nor the war's
intellectual architects are prepared to admit this. Nonetheless, the specter
of defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways.
The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning -- a
stable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the
evil Iranian and Syrian regimes -- but by the consequences of defeat. As
President Bush put it, "The consequences of failure in Iraq would be death
and destruction in the Middle East and here in America."
Tellingly, the Iraq war's intellectual boosters, while insisting the surge
is working, are moving to assign blame for defeat. And they have already
picked their target: the American people. In The Weekly Standard, Tom
Donnelly, a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute,
wrote, "Those who believe the war is already lost -- call it the
Clinton-Lugar axis -- are mounting a surge of their own. Ground won in Iraq
becomes ground lost at home." Lugar provoked Donnelly's anger by noting that
the American people had lost confidence in Bush's Iraq strategy as
demonstrated by the Democratic takeover of both houses of Congress. (This
"blame the American people" approach has, through repetition, almost become
the accepted explanation for the outcome in Vietnam, attributing defeat to a
loss of public support and not to fifteen years of military failure.)
Indeed, Vietnam is the image many Americans have of defeat in Iraq. Al-Qaeda
would overrun the Green Zone and the last Americans would evacuate from the
rooftop of the still unfinished largest embassy in the world. President Bush
feeds on this imagery. In his May 5, 2007, radio address to the nation, he
explained:
If radicals and terrorists emerge from this battle with control of Iraq,
they would have control of a nation with massive oil reserves, which they
could use to fund their dangerous ambitions and spread their influence. The
al Qaeda terrorists who behead captives or order suicide bombings would not
be satisfied to see America defeated and gone from Iraq. They would be
emboldened by their victory, protected by their new sanctuary, eager to
impose their hateful vision on surrounding countries, and eager to harm
Americans.
But there will be no Saigon moment in Iraq. Iraq's Shiite-led government is
in no danger of losing the civil war to al-Qaeda, or a more inclusive Sunni
front. Iraq's Shiites are three times as numerous as Iraq's Sunni Arabs;
they dominate Iraq's military and police and have a powerful ally in
neighboring Iran. The Arab states that might support the Sunnis are small,
far away (vast deserts separate the inhabited parts of Jordan and Saudi
Arabia from the main Iraqi population centers), and can only provide money,
something the insurgency has in great amounts already.
Iraq after an American defeat will look very much like Iraq today -- a land
divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war
being fought within its Arab part. Defeat is defined by America's failure to
accomplish its objective of a self-sustaining, democratic, and unified Iraq.
And that failure has already taken place, along with the increase of Iranian
power in the region.
Iraq's Kurdish leaders and Iraq's dwindling band of secular Arab democrats
fear that a complete U.S. withdrawal will leave all of Iraq under Iranian
influence. Senator Hillary Clinton, Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe
Biden, and former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke are among the prominent
Democrats who have called for the U.S. to protect Kurdistan militarily
should there be a withdrawal from Iraq. The argument for so doing is
straightforward: it secures the one part of Iraq that has emerged as stable,
democratic, and pro-Western; it discharges a moral debt to our Kurdish
allies; it deters both Turkish intervention and a potentially destabilizing
Turkish-Kurdish war; it provides U.S. forces a secure base that can be used
to strike at al-Qaeda in adjacent Sunni territories; and it limits Iran's
gains.
In laying out his dark vision of an American failure, President Bush never
discusses Iran's domination of Iraq even though this is a far more likely
consequence of American defeat than an al-Qaeda victory. Bush's reticence is
understandable since it was his miscalculations and incompetent management
of the postwar occupation that gave Iran its opportunity. While opposing
talks with Iran, the neoconservatives also prefer not to discuss its current
powerful influence over Iraq's central government and southern region,
persisting in the fantasy -- notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary --
that Iran is deeply unpopular among Iraq's Shiites and clerics. (At the same
time, U.S. officials accuse Iran of supplying Iraqi Shiite militias with
particularly lethal roadside bombs.)
3.
On June 25, without giving the press or White House any advance notice,
Richard Lugar, the most respected Republican voice on foreign affairs in
Congress, spoke in the Senate about "connecting our Iraq strategy to our
vital interests." On the face of it, the idea is as sensible and
conservative as the senator delivering the speech. He observed that
political fragmentation in Iraq, the stress suffered by the U.S. military,
and growing antiwar sentiment at home "make it almost impossible for the
United States to engineer a stable, multi-sectarian government in Iraq in a
reasonable time frame." Lugar noted that agreements reached with Iraqi
leaders are most often not implemented, partly, as Lugar observed, because
the leaders do not control their followers but also because Iraqi leaders
have also discovered that telling the Bush administration what it wants to
hear is a fully acceptable substitute for action.
Lugar is blunt in his description of the situation in Iraq:
Few Iraqis have demonstrated that they want to be Iraqis.... In this
context, the possibility that the United States can set meaningful
benchmarks that would provide an indication of impending success or failure
is remote. Perhaps some benchmarks or agreements will be initially achieved,
but most can be undermined or reversed by a contrary edict of the Iraqi
government, a decision by a faction to ignore agreements, or the next
terrorist attack or wave of sectarian killings. American manpower cannot
keep the lid on indefinitely. The anticipation that our training operations
could produce an effective Iraqi army loyal to a cohesive central government
is still just a hopeful plan for the future.
Lugar concluded his speech by urging that we "refocus our policy in Iraq on
realistic assessments of what can be achieved, and on a sober review of our
vital interests in the Middle East." After four years of a war driven more
by wishful thinking than strategy, this is hardly a radical idea, but it has
produced a barrage of covert criticism of Lugar from the administration and
overt attack from the neoconservatives.
Lugar's focus on the achievable runs against main currents of opinion in a
nation increasingly polarized between the growing number who want to
withdraw from Iraq and the die-hard defenders of a failure. We need to
recognize, as Lugar implicitly does, that Iraq no longer exists as a unified
country. In the parts where we can accomplish nothing, we should withdraw.
But there are still three missions that may be achievable -- disrupting
al-Qaeda, preserving Kurdistan's democracy, and limiting Iran's increasing
domination. These can all be served by a modest U.S. presence in Kurdistan.
We need an Iraq policy with sufficient nuance to protect American interests.
Unfortunately, we probably won't get it.
Peter W. Galbraith, a former US Ambassador to Croatia, is Senior Diplomatic
Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and a principal at the Windham
Resources Group, a firm that negotiates on behalf of its clients in
post-conflict societies, including Iraq. His The End of Iraq: How American
Incompetence Created a War Without End is now out in paperback
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/57286/
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